Contents

Special Weapon Effects

Usage & Description

The Flakker is a crowd-control weapon. It causes huge damage across a wide radius, but is challenging to apply in common combat. It only causes damage on detonation, which gives the Flakker a limited range in two ways: the target cannot be too close, or too far. It is very hard to hit a close up target, as the rounds fly away; for this reason, many players prefer to use other, easier-to-use shotguns that can cause more single-target damage.

The Flakker has a very low fire rate, making it unsuitable at times. While cocking the gun, players will be vulnerable as they cannot sprint and avoid incoming fire. Players can, however, fire the Flakker much faster by switching weapons as soon as they fire and immediately switching back to the Flakker. This negates its poor fire rate as well as allows the player to sprint in between shots, making the Flakker a much more deadly weapon at close range. The high-spread nature of this gun, coupled with the explosive effect, makes it effective against flying enemies within range, as the huge coverage area can help catch swooping targets.

A useful method of using this weapon effectively is to fire it from above smaller enemies at their knees. The projectiles often ricochet off the ground and land their target more often.

Notes

Pairing the Flakker with Zer0's Rising Sh0t skill can be devastating, since it allows him to gain maximum stacks in a single shot and its low fire rate doesn't let the stacks decay for a short time.

The item card is actually somewhat misleading, as it states that the weapon has "+100% Weapon Fire Rate." However, it is one of the slowest Torgue shotguns obtainable, with the lowest possible value at 0.4.

The Flakker was dropped 100% of the time from the Warrior during the Borderlands 2 $100,000 Loot Hunt, on Day 30. However, it was programmed to act as if it was an 'extra drop' to the loot pool, making it possible that two Flakkers (or another legendary within the loot pool) could drop. A hotfix on that day increased the explosion radius of the Flakker.

Speccing into either Zer0's Velocity or Maya's Accelerate can greatly increase the projectiles' range and spread massively, making the Flakker useful for large enemies such as The Warrior or The Leviathan. Unfortunately, this makes short to mid range combat near impossible.

Firing the weapon then quickly switching to a launcher can greatly increase the damage of the explosions caused by the projectiles. This abuses the passive weapon effects glitch to apply the base damage of the launcher to the explosions currently in the air.

The Flakker can deal both bullet and splash damage.

The bullet damage is capable of landing critical hits, although in reality such an event is unlikely.

The splash damage does not benefit from grenade damage bonuses, and cannot activate Krieg'sBlood Bath skill. Consequently, it gets the full damage bonus from Reaper.

Trivia

"Flak" comes from the German word "Flugzeugabwehrkanone", literally meaning "aircraft defence cannon." Since the First World War it has been used as a generic term for both anti-aircraft guns and the rounds they fire.